Forget drugs and guns—there’s something even more abhorrent happening in schools across America, and GOP Representatives from Ohio have decided to do something about it. If passed, provisions in the state’s operating budget would ban any person or organization within a school from promoting “Gateway Sexual Activity,” a ridiculous blanket term that includes critical sexual education classes.
The new provisions came courtesy of the Ohio House Republicans in the Finance Committee, who explicitly describe sex education as “venereal disease education.” Under the new law, students will have the right to file suit against school officials condoning “gateway sexual activity” on or off of school property.
Even more disturbingly, the GOP lawmakers in charge aren’t using the term “gateway” to imply protecting their children from explicitly dangerous activity, they’re using it to imply any sexual act including “touching of an erogenous zone of another…for the purpose of sexually arousing or gratifying either person.”
That means kids in Ohio won’t learn about protection or prevention. In fact, they’ll be taught the same thing Mormon kids in the 1940’s were!
How about we take this to the next level?
Our newsletter is like a refreshing cocktail (or mocktail) of LGBTQ+ entertainment and pop culture, served up with a side of eye-candy.
Teachers across the state would be instructed to:
- “Stress that students should abstain from sexual activity until after marriage.”
- “Teach the potential physical, psychological, emotional, and social side effects of participating in sexual activity outside of marriage.”
- “Emphasize adoption as an option for unintended pregnancies.”
Sure, they’re correct in saying “abstinence…is the only protection that is one hundred percent effective against unwanted pregnancy, STDs, and [AIDS],” but everyone knows asking kids to abstain from sex is tantamount to asking your dog to do the dishes.
On top of that, there’s still no study linking sexual education to a rise in disease, unwanted pregnancy or promiscuity. On the contrary, UNAIDS, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, reviewed 68 different studies from around the world in 1997, and found that “providing children with sex education does not promote promiscuity.” That was 16 years ago!
“Today the Ohio House Finance Committee voted to send our state back to the 1950s” said Kellie Copeland, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice, in a statement to The Columbus Dispatch. “The Ohio House is doing everything they can to restrict access to reproductive health care and medically accurate information that help Ohioans live healthy lives.”
The bill is scheduled to be discussed in the Ohio House on Thursday.
tdx3fan
I am all for promoting adoption as an option for unwanted pregnancies. However, the rest of this proposal is crap. Apparently, they think that teenagers will not have sex if sex is never mentioned by school officials. Hmmm! I guess this is what happens when you get your knowledge about human behavior from a source that has been outdated for the last 2000 years.
kingkuy
the arguments brought up in this legislation are so insulting i just developed Stockholm syndrome…
bless Ohio’s little heart
Cam
Look, the facts are there is really no difference between these nutbags and the radical clerics in Iran or Saudi Arabia.
These people don’t hate Radical Islam because they disagree with it,these people see it as competition.
Basically they think they want to go back a few hundred years, when they think kids were innocent and never knew about sex. The problem that they don’t get is, back then a huge number of children lived on farms and guess what…NOBODY learns where babies come from earlier than kids growing up on a farm.
MuscleModelBlog.com
According to my understanding, states with abstinence-only sex education actually have HIGHER rates of teen pregnancy. Abstinence-only education does not work.
Billysees
@MuscleModelBlog.com: 4
I’ve read and heard the same things you wrote here.
They’re better off, I think, if they keep a certain distance from the common sense and natural intelligence that students possess.
I remember what it was like when I was in school.
We were NOT a bunch of dummies that needed instruction in sexual issues.
Ridpathos
Just because the conservatives close their ears and yell “LALALALALALALA-I-CAN’T-HEAR-YOU!” doesn’t mean they should go around and make everyone do the same. Then we’d all look like idiots.